One MCP server used 18,000 tokens before doing anything. Here’s the workaround.

The New Stack · 1 week ago · 24

Pi initially avoided MCP in its coding agent because MCP servers added large context overhead before the agent did anything useful. Chrome DevTools MCP alone used about 18,000 tokens (roughly 9% of a 200,000-token context window) to load without useful work. Pi later incorporated MCP but kept tools out of the model prompt by using Codemode tool discovery and calling tools from a sandbox, reducing prompt tokens.